Fun & game

Ardennes Forest, Belgium

That village, like Bouillon, was deep in the Ardennes, 'the
greatest forest in all of Gaul', according to Julius Caesar, which
entirely covers Belgium's Luxembourg province, spilling out into
the neighbouring provinces of Haianaut and Liège, and into France
and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Thanks to the dense woods of
oak, beech, ash, hazel, maple, aspen, spruce and pine covering a
terrain of steep hills (the highest more than 600 metres) and
narrow, rocky valleys, for centuries the Ardennes was considered
impenetrable, a land inhabited by werewolves, ghosts, witches,
fairies and all manner of little people. Then in 1940 the German
High Command sent several panzer divisions through it, destroying
that notion, along with France's strategic defence plan. Four years
later, the Ardennes witnessed the bloodiest fighting on the Allied
Eastern Front, the Battle of the Bulge. To this day, soldiers'
remains turn up in the woods, and there's hardly a village in the
region without a memorial to the US, British, Commonwealth, and
Free French and Belgian forces that fought here.

Since the war, trees have been cleared from the higher hilltops.
Now fields of maize are interspersed with rolling pastureland
dotted with muscular Belgian Blue cattle, chunky white-faced Voskop
sheep and 30-metre-long log piles, seasoning for winters that can
be brutally cold.